Marketing, advertising & media intelligence

Digital marketing software provider Kenshoo recently announced the launch of a mobile display channel service in partnership with AppNexus, a company that facilitates more than 16 billion ad buys through real-time bidding every day. And following on from this, the company has also brought together all its software under a single platform called Infinity Suite.

Having first moved into the Kiwi market in 2011, Kenshoo has established ongoing partnerships with OMD and Accuen, and these changes will bring some advantages to the agencies.

"We are providing our agency partners with the ability to easily manage all key digital marketing channels through one enterprise software suite [Infinity Suite], says Liam Walsh, Kenshoo's vice president for Australia and New Zealand. "That means they can more easily access our solutions for search and social as well as add mobile and display to the mix. By packaging all of our innovation together, our clients can get more value and drive better results for brands."

Over the past few years, Kenshoo has invested heavily in mobile software to provide tools marketers could use to manage their advertising investments across major global suppliers such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook and Twitter, and today the company claims to facilitate "$350 billion in annualised client sales revenue through search, social, mobile, and display advertising."

One of the major advantages of programmatic advertising lies in the fact that it can be used to target specific segments of the market, and Walsh explains that Kenshoo's investment in technology is designed to help marketers target key segments as accurately as possible.

"As more and more media is consumed digitally, the opportunity for marketers to engage with audiences in a one-on-one manner has never been better," he says. "The key to success is being able to figure out who your best audiences are based on the likelihood they’ll turn into customers. And not just single customers, but high-value lifetime customers. To help capitalise on this, Kenshoo has invested heavily in solutions for creating audience segments and allowing marketers to reach them across devices and channels. We’ve also built sophisticated tools for forecasting and attribution so marketers can make accurate predications about where their budgets will be best spent and how every single ad influences the customer journey."

The Infinity Suite essentially brings this all together so that marketers can now manage their programmatic ad placements in one place.

As Walsh explains: "We want to make it easier for our agency partners to activate their search, social, mobile and display advertising campaigns and use their data seamlessly across these channels. We have partnered with the AppNexus platform to give agency partners and advertisers access to the best desktop and mobile display inventory in the market through select exchanges like Nexage and MoPub."

He says that Kenshoo has made these moves largely in response to demands from agencies, who want to streamline the processes.

"Agencies want to deal with fewer technology or software partners, so we try and meet a large chunk of their needs. The Infinity Suite is aimed at making the whole process of activating a digital campaign much easier and the results much better."

Walsh says that the New Zealand is going through a period of significant change, which has led to Kenshoo placing more emphasis on the market.

"In the past year the demand for robust and scalable digital marketing technology has increased dramatically, and we've upped our investment in the New Zealand market as we see a strong willingness to innovate ... [And] brands are also starting to realise the power of different digital marketing tactics to reach various goals such as using paid search programs to drive awareness and using mobile marketing to drive direct conversions. With more adoption of digital marketing channels, agencies are ramping up their capabilities and moving quickly to leverage new algorithmic-based bidding systems."

At the moment, one of the biggest challenges programmatic platforms face is that the process seems too complicated, causing some marketers to avoid it. To overcome this issue, Chango recently released a series of B2B marketing spots that aim to demystify programmatic ad-buying by educating marketers on some of its advantages.

In the Kiwi context, solving the mysteries that surround programmatic is becoming increasingly important not only due to growing digital ad spend but also because of growing speculation that television ad inventory will be sold programmatically in the near future.

Furthermore, Time Magazine and the Economist are both also experimenting with programmatic in the magazine industry—illustrating that programmatic has the potential to extend its digital tentacles into even the most traditional of channels.

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